Josh Haimson

Today @inductive_bio is launching Beacon-2, which can predict human dose directly from chemical structure. A dirty secret of AI for drug discovery is that most systems optimize the wrong reward, making them near useless in practice. Human dose is the right reward – it’s what every drug program is already optimizing. Making it computable will unlock the real-world impact of agentic drug discovery. Beacon-2 builds on our Beacon-1 models that beat 750+ competitors to win all three OpenADMET blind challenges. Whereas Beacon-1 provided a suite of models for individual molecular properties, Beacon-2 is a single system that predicts human dose end-to-end. It has three configurable modules: an ADMET-PK foundation model, a potency module that can use our fine-tunable co-folding affinity model or physics-based methods like FEP, and a PK/PD model with physiologically-informed mechanistic models of pharmacokinetics. We share validation results from Beacon-2 in a blog we are releasing today. We show that across 20 real-world drug programs running through Inductive, dose predictions from Beacon-2 agree with those from experimental data with a Spearman’s ρ of 0.61. And in a similar study on 325 publicly available compounds from the ExpansionRx OpenADMET competition, we show a Spearman ρ of 0.79. As a proof-of-concept, we gave Beacon-2 to Indy, our medicinal chemistry agent, which used it over 5 autonomous design cycles on a recently disclosed SARS-CoV-2 program to cut predicted human dose 17x, which can be the difference between a drug program that gets killed and that makes it to clinical trials. We compared the compounds that Indy designed using Beacon-2 against compounds from an optimization loop that used a potency-only reward function. The Beacon-2 compounds were favorable across three independent measures: they were preferred by chemists in blinded comparisons 87% of the time; were more druglike according to QED; and had a lower projected dose when computed by alternate methods relying on in vivo rat models and allometric scaling. Based on these encouraging results, we are now running prospective studies where compounds optimized by Beacon-2 will be validated in the lab. Read the full post here: inductive.bio/news/beacon-2 At Inductive, our long-term goal is to build superhuman chemical intelligence, and by completing the reward function for autonomous drug discovery, Beacon-2 is an exciting step toward that goal. Reach out if you’d like to get involved.